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Hip-Hop Music: Black Art, White Charts?

© Steve Juon

This has bugging me all night and I can't let it go and get to sleep until I write it out and let the rest of y'all feel what I'm thinking.

The subject of the minute for a while now has been Master P; and people seem to want to know not only WHY No Limit blows up so much but WHO it blows up with -- whether it gets play in places besides the South, whether white rap fans buy it as much as the black hip-hop heads, etc.

Now on the one hand, you have what I would call the "Down South" perspective of No Limit and Master P: the reason it's so succesful is that it's music made by black people, for black people -- and if you can't relate to the hustle and the violence then you just ain't know about life in the hood. P's Soldiers make that street level gut connection with your everyday young black male in the South (or other areas) who just ain't feelin that "college music" like Company Flow.

Now on the other hand, you have what I would call the "Urban Market" theory of record sales; which is that even a #1 album on the Billboard R&B chart is only #6 on the overall charts because it's the "ghetto" of music sales; i.e. it's the chart that reflects what the black audience is buying. Therefore if it charts high in the top 100 (as No Limit albums do) it must be because white people are out buying the album en masse on a 'Titanic' level because the black audience alone simply won't push an album to the top.

My problem is that I find EACH argument to be logically sound; and I can't really give more weight to one theory than the other. Maybe white people don't relate to what Master P is saying; but if so that doesn't explain why Master P sells so well to a Billboard Top 100 audience. If P's audience was truly black only he'd chart #1 on R&B consistently and never crack the overall top 10. On the flip side, I've seen No Limit albums crack the Billboard overall Top 100 in the top FIVE that didn't make a dent on the R&B charts anywhere! How is that possible?

I hope somebody can make sense out of this. At the very least it seems to me that Master P has a broader appeal than most people give him credit for. Maybe it's the Beats by the Pound. Maybe it's my "stupid white people" theory that means controversial or violent

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